Rethinking your continuity tech stack

Since the coro­n­avirus lock­down, dig­i­tal tools such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams have rock­et­ed to the top of the busi­ness agen­da, play­ing a cru­cial role in keep­ing peo­ple con­nect­ed. How­ev­er, there are numer­ous oth­er tools organ­i­sa­tions are rely­ing on to help their work­force while work­ing remote­ly.

Julie Berry, IT part­ner at accoun­tants Saf­fery Champ­ness, says her firm put a cloud-first strat­e­gy in place pri­or to the pan­dem­ic in a bid to increase agili­ty. To kick-start this strat­e­gy, the com­pa­ny required a new doc­u­ment man­age­ment sys­tem and it imme­di­ate­ly looked for cloud-based prod­ucts rather than on-premise alter­na­tives, which she believed were far too slow.

“The two key cri­te­ria were we want­ed some­thing that could man­age our email and ensure every­one in the firm could find the rel­e­vant doc­u­ment they need­ed,” she says.

Peo­ple were rely­ing on where they had saved a doc­u­ment on a sys­tem to track it down from the company’s serv­er, so Saf­fery Champ­ness required a prod­uct which enabled staff to search for a doc­u­ment. After a thor­ough trawl, the com­pa­ny decid­ed to opt for Net­Doc­u­ments.

“It has been huge­ly help­ful since lock­down, because it means our employ­ees can work from home and, as long as they have access to the inter­net, they can access the doc­u­ment man­age­ment sys­tem,” says Berry.

Different employees need different tools

This has also helped reduce the pres­sure on the firm’s VPN (vir­tu­al pri­vate net­work) band­width, as employ­ees no longer have to con­nect to the company’s servers to access files.

Nick McQuire, vice pres­i­dent of enter­prise research at CCS Insight, says VPNs have only been designed for around 20 per cent of most work­forces. “One firm I spoke to had to con­sid­er encour­ag­ing work­ers to work at dif­fer­ent times of the day to ease the con­straints on its VPN,” he says.

CCS Insight has seen a 100 per cent increase in the use of doc­u­ment-shar­ing and col­lab­o­ra­tion appli­ca­tions dur­ing the pan­dem­ic. But there’s clear­ly reliance on tools oth­er than video con­fer­enc­ing. Dif­fer­ent employ­ees will require dif­fer­ent types of tools to help them work remote­ly, and it’s up to organ­i­sa­tions to make sure these tools can be deployed secure­ly and with­out pres­sure on VPN band­width, says McQuire.

Multi­na­tion­al law firm King & Wood Mallesons has recent­ly migrat­ed to the iMan­age Cloud. Dar­ren Brown, head of IT in Europe and the Mid­dle East, says this has helped with work­ing from home, main­tain­ing per­for­mance and response times, and avoid­ed VPN band­width issues, which may have arisen if the company’s net­work and sys­tems had not been cloud enabled.

“iMan­age is an essen­tial tool for our lawyers, pro­vid­ing a com­plete elec­tron­ic file. It is there­fore essen­tial the plat­form is acces­si­ble when work­ing remote­ly to ser­vice our clients’ needs at all times,” says Brown.

“With iMan­age Cloud this access is achiev­able with an inter­net con­nec­tion and no com­plex needs for a VPN, ensur­ing every­one is able to see and work on the most recent and most rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion as it is need­ed.”

Microsoft services top of remote lists

The law firm also uses Microsoft Intune to push appli­ca­tions to mobile phones, includ­ing the iMan­age Doc­u­ment Man­age­ment Sys­tem, Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Teams, Elite Finance Sys­tem, Microsoft Authen­ti­ca­tor and an annu­al leave book­ing sys­tem.

“These tools ensure we are able to pro­vide a secure, per­for­mant envi­ron­ment that repli­cates the user expe­ri­ence when in the office, includ­ing tele­pho­ny, with­out com­plex redi­rec­tion of calls, time-record­ing and mat­ter man­age­ment,” says Brown.

“As the major­i­ty of the appli­ca­tion suite is cloud based, the Microsoft prod­uct set inte­grate seam­less­ly with each oth­er and oth­er prod­ucts via sin­gle sign-on and has required only a small amount of addi­tion­al train­ing, enabling the lawyers to focus on our clients and IT to con­tin­ue work­ing on busi­ness-as-usu­al activ­i­ties.”

Inte­gra­tion with Microsoft Office 365 or oth­er key email appli­ca­tions is one of the main areas organ­i­sa­tions seem to be striv­ing towards to help with remote work­ing, while also gain­ing oth­er long-term ben­e­fits.

For instance, ana­lyst firm For­rester inter­viewed Adobe Doc­u­ment Cloud and Microsoft Office 365 cus­tomers and cal­cu­lat­ed the poten­tial return on invest­ment of inte­grat­ing the two appli­ca­tions would be £7.4 mil­lion over three years. Cus­tomers said they saved time and costs in areas includ­ing dig­i­tal enrol­ment, print­ing, deliv­ery and gov­er­nance.

E‑signature prod­ucts that enable quick, easy and secure con­sent cap­ture are key to these ben­e­fits. For­rester found that Adobe Sign saves £5 and 1.5 hours per trans­ac­tion, and around £444,000 in annu­al paper costs.

How remote tech sped up paperless

Added ben­e­fits of inte­gra­tion dur­ing remote work­ing are that employ­ees don’t need to print off copies of doc­u­ments unnec­es­sar­i­ly or spend time scan­ning signed let­ters; some employ­ees may not have access to print­ers or scan­ners at home. In addi­tion, clients are more like­ly to respond swift­ly if they can sign doc­u­ments elec­tron­i­cal­ly.

Devel­op­ers at Rest Less, a web­site ded­i­cat­ed to help­ing over-50s, use a num­ber of tools to help while staff are work­ing remote­ly. These include Atlassian’s Con­flu­ence, a col­lab­o­ra­tion soft­ware pro­gramme, and Atlassian’s Jira, a soft­ware devel­op­ment tool.

One firm I spoke to had to con­sid­er encour­ag­ing work­ers to work at dif­fer­ent times of the day to ease the con­straints on its VPN

“We were using these before the pan­dem­ic as we already had some remote teams so, while oth­ers may use a board and post-it notes and things like that, we have Jira which we share as a way to track progress,” says Rest Less co-founder and chief tech­nol­o­gy offi­cer Sara Stephens.

Since the lock­down, the team has missed white­board­ing and so has start­ed to use dia­gram soft­ware Draw.io and screen-shar­ing with Google Meet, which has helped repli­cate per­son­al inter­ac­tion and enables cre­ation of flow­charts and process dia­grams.

Steve Clarke, senior man­ag­er of com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nels at Vir­gin Atlantic, says the air­line deployed Work­place from Facebook’s Knowl­edge Library to keep employ­ees informed about COVID-19. “We use it to pro­vide details on gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tions as well as spe­cif­ic poli­cies and fre­quent­ly asked ques­tions relat­ed to Vir­gin Atlantic,” he says.